Spotlight
Congratulations to Leah Graysmith, Hillery Glasby and Amanda Hayes!
Leah (pictured left) was awarded the Earl and Margaret Shively Scholarship for the 2012-13 academic year.
Leah is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in Literature. Her scholarly focus has continually come back to the study of gender and sexuality and the role that animals play in defining these concepts, as demonstrated in her Master's thesis, “Sex and Gender in the Equine in Literature,” which looked at how horses in literature represent and reflect human sexuality. The topics of chivalry and courtly love, the influence of the fairy kingdom, animal characters, and Chaucer's work on Venus, will no doubt always be a big part of what she wrestles and plays with.
Hillery (pictured right) won both the Philip and Kathleen Emily Tice Award for the best graduate essay in criticism for her paper entitled “A State(lessness) of Queer Unbelonging in Before Night Falls: Arenas as Castro’s Social Outlaw” and the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award for the English Department.
Hillery is a second-year doctoral candidate in Rhetoric and Composition. Her research interests center around the intersections of queer theory and composition studies, queer rhetorics, and critical, queer, and liberatory pedagogies. Hillery also enjoys critical theory and transnational studies, which bridge her Rhetoric and Composition concentration with her love of literature and activism. Her aim in the classroom, and in her scholarship, is to tie theory to practice in the vein of social justice. In the classroom, Hillery enacts liberatory and critical pedagogies in her classrooms. She focuses her First Year composition class around the rhetorical ecology of the anti-GLBTQ bullying movement, creating writing projects that marry the study of rhetoric with alternate composing processes and form(at)s. Her attempts to queer the composition classroom, in both content and form, result in task-based multimodal and hybrid texts that engage students in innovative and imaginative composition. Similarly, her Junior composition class analyzes the rhetorical underpinnings of social activism and political movements through the study of Revolution(ary) Rhetoric.
Amanda (not pictured) won the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award for the College of Arts and Sciences.
Amanda Hayes is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in Rhetoric and Composition. Her studies focus on Appalachian rhetorics, and her teaching centers on place-based pedagogy, which theorizes that places are rhetorically constructed and also shape people and cultures in various ways. Her most recent composition course looked at Athens as a site of multiple and at times competing discourses, which students studied and analyzed via readings and personal experiences.
Renee Behnam and Kristina Deonaldo also deserve praise, as they each earned honorable mention for the Philip and Kathleen Emily Tice Award—Renee for her essay “Frustrated Charity and the Value of Independence in Frances Burney’s Cecilia” and Kristina for her essay “The Economic Migrant in Henry James’s A Passionate Pilgrim.”
The Department of English
Our department includes faculty distributed among four program areas: Literary Studies, Creative Writing, Composition and Rhetoric, and English Education. We offer doctoral degrees in literary studies, creative writing, and composition/rhetoric, and a master’s degree in English, serving approximately sixty graduate students in any given year. On the undergraduate level, we serve close to six hundred undergraduate majors, including almost two hundred integrated language arts majors enrolled in the College of Education.
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News
Matthew Stallard Publishes Second Book on Milton
Matthew Stallard is putting the finishing touches on his editorial introduction for John Milton, Paradise Regained and Short Poems: The Biblically Annotated Edition, slated for release by Mercer University Press in June 2013. read more >>
Professor Katarzyna Marciniak co-edits book
Immigrant Protest: Politics, Aesthetics, and Everyday Dissent with Imogen Tyler--expected to release in 2014 through SUNY Press. The pair also co-edited a special issue of the journal Citizenship Studies on "Immigrant Protest" (17.2, 2013). Within the issue, Professor Marciniak contributes the article "Legal/illegal: protesting citizenship in Fortress America". The issue can be found here. read more >>
Post-doctoral Fellow Jackson Connor Publishes Essay, A Good Weapon
in the newest issue of the journal River Teeth. The essay simultaneously explores images of torture from the war in Afghanistan and issues of class, race, and prejudice in rural Pennsylvania and Athens, Ohio. Dinty W. Moore, Director of Creative Writing, calls Connor’s effort “a brave, honest, brutal, and quite beautiful essay.” The February 2013 issue of River Teeth can be purchased in paper form or for reading on a Kindle here. The essay is also available through Ohio University Library’s full-text OhioLINK database here. read more >>
Student News
Craig A. Meyer Receives MLA International Bibliography Fellowship and Publishes Article
Craig A. Meyer, a PhD Candidate, received the MLA International Bibliography this January in Boston. The fellowships help recognize the efforts of scholars who index materials on behalf of the MLA International Bibliography. As partial demonstration of the rigor, only five scholars have completed the fellowship requirements of serving three years as a field bibliographer. This year, Craig became the sixth. In addition to this award, he also recently published an article in the Spring 2013 issue of Computers and Composition Online. read more >>
Matthew Vetter’s “Composing with Wikipedia: A Classroom Study of Online Writing”
Ph.D. candidate Matthew Vetter published his article "Composing with Wikipedia: A Classroom Study of Online Writing" in the Winter 2013 issue of Computers and Composition Online. The full text can be found here. read more >>